Buttons, Buttons, Everywhere Attest to a Mania for 27 Years

By SUZANNE SLESIN

Published: October 10, 1991

ONE might say that Diana Epstein and Millicent Safro were just lucky. Twenty-seven years ago, they found their calling, followed their instincts and have been happy ever since. Ms. Epstein and Ms. Safro found buttons.

They own Tender Buttons, a shop at 143 East 62d Street in Manhattan with a branch store in Chicago. They travel a lot, in search of one or many buttons.

And this month their book "Buttons" (Harry N. Abrams, $49.50) is being published. Arranged chronologically, "Buttons" parades through the centuries, with photographs of 19th-century tintypes, which were sometimes worn by Civil War soldiers as mememtos; late-19th-century abalone shell buttons documenting the development of the railroad in France, and late-18th-century Jasperware buttons by Josiah Wedgwood.

Ms. Epstein and Ms. Safro love buttons, love to get letters about buttons, and love the exchange when a customer -- one of the 200 to 400 who squeeze into the narrow space each day -- comes in with a garment bag and says: "It's a really good jacket. I was told to get good buttons. Help!"

At the moment, she and Ms. Epstein are especially pleased with the arrival of their new brown paper bags, which are big enough to hold one button.

"We had that teeny-weeny one custom-made," Ms. Safro said, with the look of a mountain climber who has just scaled a major peak. "We had to order 5,000."

It all began in a small, dusty button shop in the East 70's, where Ms. Epstein and Ms. Safro used to stop almost 30 years ago.

"It was a totally eccentric place," said Ms. Safro, who recalled "stacked cartons, piled floor to ceiling, more like a closet than a shop."

The arrangement seemed to suit the elderly owner. "He didn't want it to be a shop," Ms. Epstein said. "It was a mania."

Soon it became their mania. They seem to have forgotten the details, but one day in 1964, Ms. Epstein, who was editing an encyclopedia, and Ms. Safro, who was an antiques restorer and artist, bought the store, lock, stock and overflowing basement.

"We thought it was funny and more like an art happening than a business," Ms. Epstein said. "The world was so busy with big things. We thought we'd get busy with small things."

The inevitable happened.Someone came into the shop looking for buttons. "We were terrified," Ms. Safro said. "We didn't know the first thing about taking money."

They sold six red buttons for a cent apiece in "our first great sale," Ms. Epstein said.

They cleaned up the basement, started learning about old buttons and bought a lot of historic ones. They discovered the world of collecting buttons.

"I'm possessed by moons," Ms. Epstein said. "I have 50,000."

For others, she added, "There's the heart, the cow, the dog, the 'anything' collection."

Ms. Epstein and Ms. Safro thrived on little idiosyncrasies and moved to their present quarters in 1968. Now, Ms. Epstein said, buttons cost from 75 cents for a "small, new four-hole classic" to $1,200 for a "George Washington inaugural." They say they sold more than 300,000 buttons last year.

"You have to sell a lot of buttons because it's not like being in the Rolls-Royce business," she said.

When customers want real pearl shirt buttons, they get them. When men -- "our most serious customers," Ms. Epstein said -- stand for hours matching up the markings on horn buttons, the proprietors beam. When a woman wanted little flat linen buttons for pillows so that she would not wrinkle her cheeks, they found them.

"We always wanted a store that was based on relationships with human beings," Ms. Epstein said.

One thing the book does not convey is the charming chaos that reigns in the second-floor office and storeroom above the shop. Every inch of every table, bookcase and chair is covered or filled with buttons. There are endearing mid-19th-century calico buttons, which were used to decorate old-fashioned illustrations; early American glass buttons, which look like miniature paperweights, and a 1950 enamel portrait of Shirley Temple.

"Diana is a master at classifying everything according to materials, period, subject," Ms. Safro said. "Nothing is computerized."

"A million young men have offered to computerize this place," Ms. Epstein said. "Are they kidding? Everything here is one of a kind."